Bruno Le Maire wants the end of the French welfare state

The Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire called for putting an end to the welfare state and moving to a “protective state” model, in order to “regain control” of a system that had become “uncontrollable” , in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche. “We must replace the welfare state with the protective state,” explains the minister, who gives this three-page interview that looks like a political program, on the occasion of the publication of a new book, “The French Way” , published by Flammarion, “written during the Christmas holidays”.

When the welfare state model was founded in 1945, it had “few benefits and many contributors. Nearly eighty years later, it has many benefits and fewer contributors. How can this hold up? Employees can no longer be the sole financiers of the social model. The burden is too heavy. We must find complementary paths, fairer and less penalizing for work and production”, develops Bruno Le Maire.

An “untenable” current model

According to him, “everywhere in Europe”, but “especially in France”, “the welfare state has ended up becoming a machine for piling on new public expenditure, without examining their relevance or their effectiveness, without questioning either plus previous expenses. We must regain control of this system which has become uncontrollable.” According to him, the current model has as its “ultimate goal free everything, for everyone, all the time: it is untenable!”.

The minister believes that “the time for choices has come”, to escape from the “mirage of universal free access”. He argues by citing in particular the aging of the population, with old age which “weighs heavily on social accounts and will weigh more and more heavily”, and calls for debate in parliament on the “major issues of aging, care dependence, support for single people”. In his vision of the France of tomorrow, Bruno Le Maire does not exclude further tightening of the conditions of unemployment insurance.

Make the hospital a priority

“We must continue to massively encourage the return to work in France. Better remuneration, training, promotion of hiring sectors, better orientation are policies that we are already implementing. Let us add a new reform of the “unemployment insurance: we still have one of the most generous compensation periods in Europe. This generosity comes at a high price: an unemployment rate still above that of our main economic partners,” says the minister.

If we want to make hospital emergencies a priority, we must know how to give up “other less priority expenses,” he says.